A Walk on the Moon (1999)
from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

This movie was a very
pleasant surprise to me. It's a 1999 movie which bombed in a limited
theatrical run, and I expected it to bite the begonia, but it touched
me.

It uses 1969 as a
backdrop to show how the social and cultural revolution of the late
60's affected real people, average folks with real and largely unarticulated
longings for change. It is completely believable - a real rarity
in American movies. No bizarre coincidences, no artificial
resolutions. It does have kind of a happy ending, but a realistic one.
All the characters, situations, and dialogue are real.

This is how "the
60's" really affected us.

I was very impressed
with the script as well as with the acting. It isn't a movie of grand
sweep, but it's good. I felt it was much better than the two stars
Ebert gave it. Liev Schreiber, in particular, was excellent as the
cuckolded husband.Come to
think of it, Liev is pretty good in everything.

NUDITY REPORT

Diane Lane was
topless twice - once under a waterfall with Viggo, once
partially covered in paint

There was
also nudity from some miscellaneous hippies at Woodstock

The
simple story:

Diane Lane plays a
young wife who goes off to the Catskills for the family summer trip.
For various reasons, her husband wasn't able to spend much time with
his family that summer. Although she loved her husband and realized
what a good person he was, she had some deep stirrings for rebellion
and change and variety and spontaneity, and she ended up spending a
weekend at Woodstock with an itinerant blouse salesman. In the long
run, this forced her to start moving closer to her husband since they
had to scrape the everyday veneer from their conversations and get
down to what they were really feeling.

The film is, in its way,
kind of a hymn to the best days of my generation. In the summer of
1969, within a very short time, man walked on the moon and the
Woodstock festival took place. That
packed a tremendous amount of epochal and newsworthy significance into
a couple of weeks. You might call
it the reconciliation of opposites, the apotheosis of sophisticated
science side by side with an urge to rejoin nature in pastoral
simplicity, a statement that love and progress could stand
side-by-side, or could battle each other to the death. Both
events, in their way, marked beginnings and endings, and both
symbolized hope.

For my generation it was a
helluva summer. For me as well. It was the peak of my acting career, and the
summer I fell in love for the first time. The world was filled with infinite
promise, as they say. On the other hand, infinite promise matched with finite
abilities leads to near-infinite disappointment.

But that doesn't make the
nostalgia any less sweet.

This movie is about how
those cosmic events, and the cultural revolution of the late 60's,
affected ordinary people. Not student radicals, or naked hippies, or
Marxists, but you and me. The great silent short-haired socks-wearing
masses. For many women, it was about wanting to expand the
constricting stereotypical roles assigned to them in the post-war era.
Like most people, the Diane Lane character knows the times they are a
changin', but she doesn't know what it all means to her. Still, she
has this unarticulated feeling that if there is more freedom to be
had, she wants a chunk of it.

So did we all.

Maybe the reason why
I like the film that has nothing to do with the quality of the film
itself. Maybe it's just one of those otherwise uninspired movies, like
"Kiss the Sky", that sums up the generational angst of the
aging Baby Boomers like me, the feeling that everything didn't turn
out the way we planned.

Everybody in my
generation seems to claim to have gone to Woodstock, even if they were
living in Albania at the time. If you took a survey of people who are
about my age, then extrapolated the results to the full population,
there must have been 30 million people there.

But me, I could have
just about walked there from where I was, and didn't go. Oh, we talked
about it, we knew it was happening, but .... you know how it is.

IMDb
guideline: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence, about like three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, about like two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, about like two stars from the critics.
Films under five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film, equivalent to about one
and a half stars from the critics or less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well.

Based on this
description, this film is a C+ or maybe a B-. I'm not sure,
because it's too close to my own experiences, so I can't gauge
if others without those shared memories will find it
interesting. Excellent look back at the meaning of the 60's
cultural revolution for ordinary people.